


Ya’aburnee

by imitateslife



Category: Phantom - Susan Kay
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Het Relationship, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Pre-Canon, Romance, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 13:40:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6958894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imitateslife/pseuds/imitateslife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nadir never expected to be made a widower. Nadir/Rookheeya. Angst/Romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ya’aburnee

My father buried a wife many years ago. His first wife, his principle wife; the mother of my middle sister. I was two at the time and remember nearly nothing about her. Khadijeh as her name. All I knew of her was that she had had Sogand’s lean frame and curly hair and that my father had loved her very much. He loved my mother, too; greatly – he was nothing, if not magnanimous with his love – but there had always been something especially dear to him about Khadijeh. They had had other children before I was born – I would have been a middle child, but for Allah’s will – who had died young. It was perhaps cruel irony that Khadijeh passed while delivering their only surviving child. I did not understand irony when I first learned about all this, nor did I understand that I, too, could be a widower.

What I understood, however, was that I was not as giving with my love as my father before me. I held most at arms-distance and loved only a precious few. My mother. My father. My sisters. My servant.

My wife.

I loved Rookheeya most of all and I knew that our love was not like that which my father had held for Khadijeh or that which my father had for my mother. We were not merely affectionate, but two halves of a single soul. It was as if we never met, but had instead known each other all along, over lifetimes and lifetimes. We were home to one another, moreso than the grand estate of my forefathers. We spoke a half a dozen languages between the two of us, but the language of our hearts was a private one, conveyed by a look, a smile, a touch…

I imagined – as young men are wont to do – that she and I would live our lives together until old age left us silver and small, doting over grandchildren and awaiting the day when we reached Paradise together. I suppose I knew that we were both mortal, but I reasoned that if one of us were to die first, it would be me. I was the chief of police in the region and there was little the royal family loved more than to send me on dangerous, delicate missions that interrupted the banality of local governance. I was always more in harm’s way.

Besides, I knew that I could not live without her. It would be like living without a heart, a mind, a soul.

But Rookheeya was plucked from my side too quickly – much too quickly. The night our son was born. History, I suppose, has a way of repeating itself. Time moves cyclically. I never understood the melancholy that clouded my father’s face every year on Sogand’s birthday until I, too, wrestled with joy and sorrow on my child’s birthday. In her last hours, Rookheeya had given me the greatest joy in the world, but  _she_  had always been my greatest joy in the world.

There is a phrase I learned abroad that I brought home to Rookheeya when we were young. In Arabic, one does not simply say “I love you” to his soulmate. Instead, he tells her “Ya’aburnee”. It means “You bury me”. It means that I hope never to outlive you, for life without you is not life at all. I used to whisper these words against the back of Rookheeya’s neck as I breathed in her sweet scent. At night, when we slept in tangled limbs together and she thought I could not hear, she would whisper it back.

If I had only known then how seriously to take her words, I never would have taught her the horrid phrase.

_You bury me._

I have and though I filled her open grave with soil and have watched as flowers and grass have grown over her body, nothing can fill the gaping void in my core. No friend, no family, no one.

 _You bury me_.

I have and with you, my beloved, is half my soul, half my heart, half my life. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ya'aburnee is an Arabic phrase meaning "you bury me". It is used as a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.


End file.
